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At some point during the 31st of May 1669, a learned if bawdy, witty if obscene, educated if scandalous, pious if irreverent rake, raconteur, and libertine who’d recorded over one million words about his life for almost a decade stopped his private scribblings, even though this gentleman named Samuel Pepys would live for more than another three decades. To the best of our knowledge, until that point no Englishman had ever provided such a complete accounting; such a scrupulous interrogation not of the soul, but of a life—a largely secular exercise in tabulating not just wars, but dinners; not just plagues, but nights at the theater. Beginning on January 1st upon the first year of Restoration, Pepys would record everything from when fire immolated the city of London to a particularly enjoyable stew of tripe and mustard. An entry dated March 10th, 1666 confesses that the “truth is, I do indulge myself a little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age of my life to do it,” and such a position could be the motto of Pepys’s diary. That document doesn’t reach the rhetorical heights of other 17th-century classics—it has not the poetry of William Shakespeare’s famed soliloquy in Hamlet, nor the intellectual sophistication of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets or George Herbert’s The Temple. Rather, what Pepys offered was something different, but no less impressive—a complete map of an individual human life and mind during that defined period of time. As novelist Philip Hensher notes in The Atlantic, “there is no precedent and no parallel for what Pepys actually did.”

Restoration was inaugurated with King Charles II’s triumphant return to London to avenge his father’s regicide, and Pepys would work as administrator of the Navy in the new regime. This was a fabulous era of theatricality after a decade of dreary Puritan Interregnum; when John Dryden’s and Aphra Behn’s elaborate set-pieces thrilled London audiences, when Isaac Newton’s New Physics transformed the very nature of motion, when wits from John Wilmot to William Wycherley injected English letters with a pump of aphrodisiacs. An era ruled by an aristocracy that Peter Stallybras and Allon White describe in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression as being “carelessly demonic, nonchalantly outrageous, cynical in the way that only a class which despises its compromises can be cynical,” all of which Pepys was able to document. Pepys observed both the plague and the Great Fire of London, the first which decimated the capital and the later which purified it, and the Second Anglo-Dutch War when the English traded the tropical paradise of Suriname for a small village named New Amsterdam on the tip of Manhattan Island. With large, soulful brown eyes, jutting lower lip, and curly auburn hair, Pepys cut a swath through London society, from the coffee houses and printers of Fleet Street to the book stalls at St. Paul’s, pushing the Socratic injunction to “Know thyself” to its extreme, the most self-obsessed man in a self-obsessed era. A man aptly described by Emily Cockayne in Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England as the sort “not to make too much of a fuss about being accidentally spat on by a lady in the theatre—providing the lady was pretty.”

Yet after nine years of privately recording his movement in regal circles, his observation of scientific and technological changes, his attendance at the splendid plays of the Restoration, his intellectual intercourse with the era’s great minds (as well as the other type of intercourse), Pepys made his last entry on that spring evening in 1669. Fearing that he was going blind (he was not going blind), the diarist signed off with “The good God prepare me,” and so after one million words Pepys would fall silent in the record of his own life. A funny thing which literary anniversaries we choose to commemorate or not. Certain authors come in for posthumous honoring more than others—Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens. This year sees the 200th birthday of the great, grey bard of Camden, Walt Whitman, and his work will be rightly celebrated with events throughout his cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. Three years ago was the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and it received a predictable amount of attention; 2023 will be the 400th year of publication for the first folio of the dramatist’s complete works, and it too will undoubtedly be commemorated with exhibitions, lectures, plays, books, and articles (I’m penciling such retrospectives into my own writing schedule right now). Pepys’s retirement as a diarist, by contrast, seems to largely be passing without much mention; the release of a commemorative coin from the Royal Mint (which he was associated with) notwithstanding.

An irony in this, because Pepys is in many ways a prophet of our own self-obsessed age. Pepys’s fragmentary, digressive, contradictory, messy diary (which was as voluminous in its output as it was disorganized in its execution) foreshadows our own individual self-fashioning. In Pepys we see Facebook; we see Twitter. British actor and web-programmer Phil Gyford sees in the diary a forerunner of blogging, and as part of an online project he spent nine years posting Pepys’s entries in real time. Lisa Schamess, in a delightful essay for Creative Nonfiction, considers both Gyford’s project and the general compatibility of Pepys’s diary with our own digital moment, arguing this his prose itself is “elegant evidence of how lustily the 17th century’s most famous diarist might have embraced the internet, tapping up its opulent charms deep into the night.” With an admirable eye towards close reading and comparison, Schamess reads through several of Pepys’s entries to demonstrate how in their half-formation, their digressions, and their exhibitionism, they’re reminiscent of Facebook posts. Schamess writes that Pepys’s “sharp eye and acid wit would be perfect for the restless internet, with its thin, glowing scrim between life and audience, its illusion of anonymity and controllable intimacy.”

Much is convincing in Schamess’s observation, yet it’s undeniable that even if his prose would be copacetic with the internet’s “illusion of anonymity and controllable intimacy,” Pepys’s actual writing was, at least while he was alive, completely private. Scholarly arguments abound about just how private Pepys’s expected his writings to ultimately be, and yet Gyford’s neat conceit aside, the historical diarist was not hitting “Post” after each one of his entries. Hewing to a more traditional interpretation of Pepys that sees him as a man of the late, late Renaissance, content to exist in wonder and curiosity, his editor Richard La Gallienne claimed that for Pepys’s “It is not so much himself that interests him, more merely the things that happen to himself, but the people about him and the things that are happening to everybody, all the time, to his nation as well as to his acquaintance.” Schamess’s and Gyford’s arguments about “social media Pepys” would be anachronistic coming from Pepys’s editor, a man old enough to have had an affair with Oscar Wilde, but perhaps La Gallienne would have concurred with them had he known what the internet was. Regardless, even in La Gallienne’s reading of the man’s character, there is something undeniable modern (or post-modern) in his vociferous appetites, his manner of absorbing, repackaging, and projecting his experience. In Pepys’s diary, there is an equivalence between his mind and the world, and what could be more contemporary than that, whether on paper or in 140-characters?

Written in a code-like short-hand developed in the 16th century, Pepys’s diary wouldn’t see publication until his writing was deciphered in the early 19th century; his previous reputation resting entirely on his role in civil government, ranging from membership in Parliament and being administrator of the Royal Navy to a position on the Tangier Council during the short years that the English governed a Moroccan colony. Pepys’s great colleague in self-introspection (or self-obsession), the Frenchman Michelle de Montaigne, may have invented the essay form more than a century earlier, but even he couldn’t match the Englishman for sheer magnificent, glorious, transcendent narcissism. The diary is what his name shall be inextricably linked with, not necessarily for the quality of the prose (though Pepys is often a fine stylist), but rather for the raw, honest, unguarded reflection on a sheer multitude of subjects ranging from politics to theater to medicine to sex. One of his 19th-century readers, the Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, writes that Pepys’s style “may be ungrammatical, it may be inelegant, it may be one tissue of mistakes, but it cannot be devoid of merit.” With what seems like faint praise, Stevenson clarifies that the worthiness of Pepys lay in a style that is “indefatigably lively, telling and picturesque…[dealing] with the whole matter of a life and yet is rarely wearisome.”

At turns anxious and perverse, aroused and guilty, introspective and arrogant, horny and holy, Pepys’s diary was the most complete record of the Restoration era, and of the vagaries of a human mind in all of its splendid contradiction. Tolerant and humane, if skeptical, in his Anglicanism, Pepys was an often unconvinced enthusiast of church sermons, writing on January 19 1661: “To church in the morning, where Mr. Mills preached upon Christ’s being offered up for our sins, and there proving the equity with what justice would lay our sins upon his Son.” Yet he was also the author who was able to write of his wife discovering Pepys’s dalliance with her maid Deb Willet as “coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl [with] my [hand under] her coats; and indeed I was with my [hand] in her cunny,” his indiscretions characteristically hidden in a hodgepodge of ellipses. Elsewhere he deploys a strange pidgin of English, Spanish, and French to mask his pornographic obsessions—idiosyncratic ciphers that if one can read his shorthand take most readers mere seconds to crack. That’s always been the enigma of Pepys, a man who spent so much time writing his apparently private diary, who took the most marginal of non-pains to cloak his indiscretions, and yet had the entire project bound in six volumes and categorized in his library’s bibliography with the apparent foreknowledge that it’d inevitably see posthumous publication.

Pepys is the virtual font of an age for those of us who are weirdly enmeshed in the 17th century, attracted to a melancholic era of stunning contradiction, which White and Stallybras describe as being both “classical and grotesque, both regal and foolish, high and low.” To read Pepys is to inhabit his world, and while among the great prose stylists of that century he lacks the metaphysical acumen of Donne, the philosophical flights of Thomas Browne, or the psychological insight of Robert Burton, Pepys makes up for those deficiencies by simply being there—day after day, for the better part of Restoration’s first decade. Consider the eeriness of his first-hand account of the plague which leveled London in 1665, forcing the court to rusticate themselves as the buboes spread through the capital:

This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “Lord Have Mercy upon Us” writ there – which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind… that I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell and chew, which took away the apprehension.

Such a fusion of the horrific and the prosaic
conveys an immediacy that is still present three-and-a-half centuries later, a
sense of “This must have been what it was like.” Or consider his account of the
Great Fire of London from that satanic year of 1666, which remains haunting in
its specificity, the small details of tragedy illuminating the experience more
than maps and demographics ever could hope to:

Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.

Hensher observes that from a “seventeenth-century perspective, everything here is a deplorable breach of literary manners: the undignified interest in inessentials, the failure to assert any kind of moral about people’s scrabbling after their possessions, and the eccentric, unpolished syntax.” And yet Pepys’s is a novelistic sensibility, apt more for Dickens or Gustave Flaubert than for his own century; an empathy that understands that there is infinitely more to be conveyed in the image of singed pigeons than the sophistries of theodicy that impose false meaning on such tragedy.

In making record of the 17th century, there is certainly something innately attractive in gravitating towards those particular dates that loom large, but what’s most evocative in Pepys are the personal details, the mundanities but which by virtue of his having recorded them now belong to the annals of eternity. On April 4th, 1663 he makes record of dinner “most neatly dressed by our own only maid,” in which Pepys and his guest feasted upon a “fricassee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie), a dish of anchovies, good wine of several sorts, and all things mighty noble and to my great content.” There are, it should be said, numerous entries of this sort. Think of it as the Restoration equivalent of an Instagrammed food picture. He’s less charitable in his theater recommendations; writing on September 29tht, 1662 that he went to the “King’s Theatre, where we saw Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.” But what’s Shakespeare next to a lamprey pie?

Or Pepys harrowing reminiscence of a surgical procedure, more than two centuries before anesthesia, which removed a kidney stone the size of a tennis ball from his bladder. Medical historian Roy Porter writes in Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine that “invasive surgery was limited in scope; lengthy operations, or ones demanding great precision, were out of the question.” Nevertheless, “A brave man—Samuel Pepys was one—might risk having a bladder stone removed surgically.” We should be thankful that the physician was the rare 17th-century doctor who saw fit to wash his hands before venturing tasks urological, for had there been for a bit more grime upon his digits when he performed surgery on Pepys’s peep and we’d never have had the diary to read. Pepys had his anatomical memento mounted as a trophy, writing March 26th, 1660 that “This day it is two years since it pleased God that I was cut of the stone…and did resolve while I live to keep it a festival.” Supposedly Pepys would plunk the stone into glasses of wine.

Then of course there is all of the sex in Pepys, with squeamish Victorian editors deleting whole entries where the diarist both luxuriated and punished himself over perversions both imagined and enacted. Pepys enumerated the women, from aristocrats to maids, wives and daughters of friends and colleagues, whom he fucks; women united in the status of not being his wife. Obsessed with not only his own erotic adventures, Pepys spends ample time hypocritically chastising Charles II’s own notorious appetites, while fantasizing about the monarch’s mistresses, from the actress (and “Protestant Whore”) Nell Gwynne to the aristocratic Barbara Villiers, whom Pepys claims he had a sex dream of that was “the best that ever was dreamt.” Still substantially less problematic than the entry from May 21st, 1662 in which Pepys writes that he came across Villiers’s underwear being hung out to dry in the palace at Whitehall’s privy garden, being “the finest smocks and linned petticoats…laced with rich lace at the bottom, that ever I saw; and did me good to look upon them.”

Cockayne writes that Pepys was “often led by his libido,” and indeed there is something disquieting about the author spending all of this time lusting after scullery maids and servants, duchesses and actresses. Critic Warren Chernaik writes in Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature that the infamously scurrilous theater of the period was “fundamentally conservative in its sexual attitudes.” Reading all of those lustily guilty passages of Pepys, and you can get a sense for the fundamentally reactionary nature of the diarist’s priapic concerns, where prurience and puritanism are twined pairs. Chernaik writes that “With nothing to rebel against, no taboos to be transgressed, blasphemy would lose its power to shock. It can be argued that society creates its rebels,” so that far from an exercise in liberation, Pepys’s orgasmic encounters were a type of prison, with nobody trapped in the neurotic cycle of release and guilt more than the author himself. Evelyn Lord in The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies, writes about Pepys’s encountering, while perusing book-stalls with his wife, a lewd French volume entitled The School of Venus (infamous for its illustrations of society women purchasing prodigiously endowed dildos). Lord writes that after expressing disgust at the book, Pepys “put it back on the shelf. However, he was unable to resist it, and eventually went back and purchased it in plain binding, took it home, read it and then burned it.” One imagines that Pepys perhaps had more onanistic concerns with the book that even he wouldn’t put into record.

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Yes Please

Denouncing The School of Venus to his wife, while later purchasing it in plain paper—was Pepys a hypocrite? Of course, he was a hypocrite. Did he feel guilt over his indiscretion? The ashes of his smut should leave little doubt that he did. Something modern in that position, the enigma of the neurotic. Pepys is our contemporary in that he dwells in a certain negative capability, a fractured ego strung as it is between the public and personal, the spectacle of accountability and the private web browser. In that manner, I see less of Twitter and Facebook in Pepys, less of the carefully manicured self-creation implied by our collective digital subterfuge, and more of a different post-modern literary genre—Samuel Pepys was the first writer of autofiction. That form, defined as it is by the presence of a narrator who is largely the same as the author but who dwells in the massive complexity of the individual, including all that is hidden (perhaps even from the author themselves). The true inheritors of Pepys’s ethos aren’t all of us clicking away on Twitter, it’s not the vulgarities of those writing status update while sitting on the toilet. Rather it’s those obsessive writers cataloging the minutia of their lives; poet Ben Lerner in 10:04, Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, Teju Cole’s Open City, and especially the Norwegian completist Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-volume My Struggle.

In that 3,600-page door-stopper, Knausgård contemplates both his conflicted relationship with his father, and the breakfasts he prepares for his children—with as much detail as Pepys once did. Knausgård writes of days that were “jam-packed with meaning, when each step opened a new opportunity, and when ever opportunity filled me to the brim.” The task of My Struggle was for Knausgård to write deliberately and simply, to dwell in the prosaicness of detail. By comparison, Hensher describes the minutia of Pepys’s diary as being such that most of its entries couldn’t be “considered important in any obvious way; each has the quality, instead, of being interesting, which is much stranger and harder to achieve. We know about the socially aspiring dish of tripe and the randy morning because the man wrote it down.” That is the cracked wisdom shared by both Knausgård and Pepys, the understanding that we don’t write about things because they’re important, but rather things become important because we write about them. Jonathon Sturgeon claims in Flavorwire that the best description of the autofictional novel is a book where “the oeuvre is the soul. The artist’s body of work…has come to replace the religious ideal of the immortal spirit.” If that’s true, I’d venture that Pepys’s profane, grubby, earthy, secular diary is the first autofictional novel, in all of its over-determined detail, with all of its insignificant meanings, and especially with all of its contradictions of spirit, so very human in their deployment.

Writing of Pepys shortly after the diary had been rediscovered and published in the 19th century, Stevenson provided gloss for Pepys’s protean character: “We all, whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape ourselves when we address our fellows; at a given moment we apprehend our character and acts by some particular side; we are merry with one, grave with another, as befits the nature of demands of the relation.” Such a mercurial nature is our common birthright, and in the sloppy, imperfect, anomalous medium of a diary we can see a certain process made naked. A polished essay is like the woman or man dressed formally for a job interview, clothing dry-cleaned and hair perfectly coifed—the individual self-fashioned into the most presentable of versions. Diaries are how we actually are more or less all of the time—messy, confused, and impolite. Le Gallienne argues that “The record was a secret between himself and his own soul, not forgetting his God… whom he invokes on many curious occasions.” Written for the Lord and for posterity, Pepys’s diary is a record of the soul before editing and revision, which is to say a record of the soul as it actually is. No deletions, no rearrangements, no strike-throughs, but rather a manuscript as a man, all error and contradiction—and the more perfect for it.

“To burn a book is to bring light to the world.” —Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810)
“Every book burned enlightens the world.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Circumstances surrounding the occasional rediscovery of the poetry of the 17th-century divine Thomas Traherne are as something out of one of his strange lyrics. Intimations of the allegorical, when in the winter of 1896—more than two centuries after he’d died—and some of his manuscript poetry was discovered in a London book stall among a heap that was “about to be trashed.” William Brooke, the man who rescued these singular first drafts, had originally attributed them to Traherne’s contemporary, the similarly ecstatic Henry Vaughan, ensuring that at least until proper identification was made the actual author could remain as obscure in posterity as he had been in life. How eerily appropriate that among that refuse was Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation, which included his observation that the “world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it.” Not until he chances upon it in a London book stall.

Traherne’s lyrics have reemerged like chemicals in a poetic time-release capsule, with the majority uncovered only after that initial lucky find. As his poetry expresses sacred mysteries, holy experiences revealed, and the subtlety of what his contemporary George Herbert termed “something understood,” how appropriate that Traherne’s work should be revealed as if an unfolding prophecy? Traherne, after all, prophetically declares that he will “open my Mouth in Parables: I will utter Things that have been Kept Secret from the foundations of the World,” a poet of secrets whose poetry had been kept secret, a visionary of paradox whose work celebrates “Things Strange yet common; Incredible, yet Known; Most High, yet plain; Infinitely Profitable, but not Esteemed.”

With prescience concerning his own reputation, Traherne wrote of that “Fellowship of the Mystery, which from the beginning of the World hath been hid in GOD, [and] lies concealed!” Like so many of his contemporaries, from Herbert to Vaughan, Traherne was of Welsh extraction, smuggling into English poetics the mystically inflected Christianity of the Celtic fringe. Unlike them, he has remained largely unknown, with the Anglican priest born in either 1636 or 1637 to a Hertfordshire shoe maker and a mother whose name doesn’t survive. Traherne published only a single book before his death in 1674, an anti-Catholic polemic entitled Roman Forgeries. Such didacticism obscured Traherne’s significance, for in his other work uncovered during the 20th century, Traherne has emerged as a luminous, ecstatic, transcendental advocate for direct unmediated experience of the divine, where he instructs in “many secrets to us show/Which afterwards we come to know.”

Now an Anglican divine, honored by the Church of England on October 10 and Episcopalians on September 27, Traherne is venerated in votive candle and stain glass, exemplifying the High Church perspective he embodied—rituals of incense and bells, of Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and the liturgy of hours. Traherne, it should be said, was a bit of a cracked saint, however. As Leah Marcus notes in her essay “Children of Light,” reprinted in the Norton Anthology Seventeenth-Century British Poetry: 1603-1660, Traherne may have “loved Anglicanism” but “he built a large body of thought quite independent of it.” Following the chaos of nonconformism which marked the years of civil war, Traherne’s theology exceeded even the relative tolerance afforded by the developing policy of “latitudinarianism.” Marcus explains that Traherne contradicted “many of the chief tenets of Anglicanism,” possibly believing in a borderline pantheistic sense of God’s immanence in the natural world. Traherne, Marcus writes, intuited that “Heaven, eternity, paradise… are not places. They are a state of mind.”

Such a strange poetic saint has continued to pay academic dividends for scholars fortunate enough to come upon misplaced work, exemplifying Traherne’s contention that “Some unknown joys there be / Laid up in store for me.” Among several such discoveries of “unknown joys,” there was the Traherne recovery by two scholars in 1996 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., when Julia Smith and Laetitia Yeandle found an epic poem that reworked the narratives of Genesis and Exodus. Only a year later, and Jeremy Maute—working in Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the archbishop of Canterbury—discovered Traherne’s The Kingdom of God; unread for more than 300 years and regarded as a masterpiece, fulfilling the marginalia of an anonymous 17th-century annotator writing in that book’s flyleaf, who rhetorically queried, “Why is this soe long detained in a dark manuscript, that if printed would be a Light to the World, & a Universal Blessing?”

For sheer miraculousness in the capricious contingency of the Lord, the most striking example of such a discovery is described by Kimberly Johnson in Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry, where she writes that a “manuscript of visionary, rhapsodic work in mixed genre called Commentaries of Heaven… was rescued, half-burning and stinking, from a Lancashire trash heap in 1967.” Singed and still smoking, these singular papers were chanced upon by a man scouring the trash yard for discarded car parts. If said scavenger had been tardy in his scrounging, those verses would have been sent heavenward like the images of luminescence which permeate Traherne’s poetry. Helpful to remember the argument of Fernando Baez in A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq, who explained that when it comes to books, sometimes ironically, “Fire is salvation.” Such power to “conserve life is also a destructive power,” for fire allows us to play “God, master of the fire of life and death.” After all, we often “destroy what we love,” and if there is anything at the center of Traherne’s poetry it is the ecstasies of God’s obscured love, absconded away in lost books hidden at the center of fiery whirlwinds.

A parable worthy of Traherne: hidden scripture as a variety of burnt offering upon the pyre of the Lord, in the form of a smoldering Lancashire garbage heap. Browned paper blackening and curling at the edges, atoms of ink evaporated and stripped to their base elementals, literature reduced to an ash where poetry can no longer be read, but must rather be inhaled. Fortunate that Commentaries of Heaven was found, and yet there is a profundity in disappearing verse; the poem written, but not read; consideration of all which is beautiful that has been lost, penned for the audience of God alone. In that golden, glowing ember of such a profane place as a garbage dump, there is an approach to what literary historian Michael Schmidt references in his Lives of the Poets as Traherne’s “Images of light – starlight, pure light” as belonging to the “fields of heaven and eternity.”

As metaphysical conceit, the manuscript was not simply a burning tangle of paper, but it was as if finding God himself in the trash fire, where the words “Who cannot pleas far more the Worlds! & be/A Bliss to others like the Deitie” were rescued from an oblivion of fire. Baez writes that by “destroying, we ratify this ritual of permanence, purification, and consecration.” After all, it was presumably only the heat and light that drew the scavenger’s attention, a brief moment when the volume could announce its existence before it would be forever burnt up like a Roman candle, lest it rather forever mold and rot. Baez writes that “we bring to the surface” through flammability, there is a restitution of “equilibrium, power or transcendence.” To burn sparks a light; to enflame such poetry is to set a purifying fire, and to find such an engulfed volume is to encounter a glowing divinity on the road from Lancashire. Traherne, the burning poet, who wrote “O fire of heaven! I sacred Light / How fair and bright, / How great am I, / Whom all the world doth magnify!”

Categorized as a “metaphysical poet,” of which Dr. Samuel Johnson in his 1781 Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets described as being “men of learning” only interested “to show their learning.” Dr. Johnson infamously defined the metaphysical poets, 17th-century figures including John Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and (sometimes) Andrew Marvell, as trading in clever metaphorical conceits whereby “the most heterogenous ideas are yoked by violence together.” In Donne’s verse, for example, two lovers could be described as the arms of a compass, or as Herbert’s devotional poetry took on the shape of objects he describes, as in “The Altar” from his 1633 The Temple. Often dismissed as more concerned with cleverness than depth, wit rather than rectitude, T.S. Elliot would refer to them as a “generation more often named then read.” Defense of the metaphysical poets was a modernist endeavor, begun by criticism like Elliot’s 1921 essay in the Times Literary Supplement, so that eventually the movement came to be regarded as the exemplar of the late English Renaissance.

Traherne’s identification as a metaphysical, especially concerning his erudition and his religious enthusiasms, makes a certain sense. Yet he is less fleshy (and flashy) than Donne, less conventionally pious than Herbert, less political than Marvell, and nearest in tenor to Vaughan. It’s true that they share mystical affinities, even while the enthusiasms of the former are far more optimistic than those of the later. Yet Vaughan, associated with that philosophical circle the Cambridge Platonists, was privy to circulation—to being read and written about—to in short, influence. Traherne, by contrast, scribbled in obscurity. In designating him a member of such a group, we should remember that he had no influence on the rest of that school, for they hadn’t read him. But as Schmidt writes, “Such obliquity doesn’t obscure the material world; it illuminates what exists beyond it.” Traherne may be a poet outside of history and a creature without canon, but his audience is in eternity.

Dr. Johnson wouldn’t have read him a century later, either. For that matter, Elliot wouldn’t have been able to read the majority of work attributed to Traherne, since the initial rediscoveries of the poet’s work only saw print little more than a decade before “The Metaphysical Poets” was published in TLS. More apt to think of Traherne as being a poetic movement of one, for when reading his cracked verse, with its often-surreal content and its ecstatic declarations, it’s just as easy to see Emily Dickinson as Donne, William Blake as Herbert. If anything, a blind analysis of Traherne’s poetry could lead a reader to think that this was verse by an exuberant Romantic, a mystical transcendentalist, a starry-headed Beat burning in the dynamo of the night.

Consider his startlingly modern lyric “The Person,” where Traherne writes of “The naked things” that “Are most sublime, and brightest.” Inheritor of a Christian tradition of our innate fallenness, Traherne focuses on the divine immanence that permeates creation, as well as that transcendence that nature points towards. Nature is precisely not fallen, as when Traherne writes that “When they alone are seen: / Men’s hands than Angel’s wings / Are truer wealth even here below.” An almost exact contemporary of the Dutch Sephardic Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, Traherne evidences that pantheistic fervor which understands creator and creation to be synonymous, arguing for direct experience of the noumenal, for their “worth they then do best reveal, /When we all metaphors remove, /For metaphors conceal.”

Traherne argues for divine language, a semiotics that approaches the thing-in-itself, poetry of experience that recognizes metaphor as idolatry, for the “best are blazon’d when we see / The anatomy, / Survey the skin, cut up the flesh, the veins / Unfold, the glory there remains: / The muscles, fibers, arteries and bones / Are better far than crowns and precious stones.” When Traherne wrote, Puritan typologists investigated scripture and nature alike for evidence of predestined fallenness; when Traherne wrote, Christian apologists charted irreconcilable differences between language and our world after Eden. But Traherne, rather, chose to write in that lost tongue of Paradise. His was an encomium to direct experience, an account of what the very marrow of life thus ingested did taste like. A language which in its immediacy seems both shockingly current and as ancient as gnostic parchment. Encapsulated in his poetry there is something not just of his era, but of all eras, occluded though that eternal message may be.

Demonstration of Stuart Kelly’s description in The Book of Lost Books of “an alternative history of literature, an epitaph and a wake, a hypothetical library and an elegy to what might have been.” Traherne’s poetry was written during years of first Puritan Interregnum and then High Church Restoration, but for either authority the poet’s views would be idiosyncratic. Detecting intimations of consciousness on the moon and in the sea, dreaming of both angels and aliens when he “saw new worlds beneath the water like, / New people; ye another sky.” Marcus writes that Traherne couldn’t “be entirely defended against charges of heresy,” which might have been an issue had anyone read his poetry.

Arguments can be proffered that Traherne was a pantheist who believed that nature was equivalent with God, that he was a Pelagian who denied the existence of original sin, or that he was a universalist who anticipated eternal salvation for all. A poet for whom the human body is to be celebrated, who would opine that “Men are Images of GOD carefully put into a Beautiful Case,” who with urgency would maintain that the souls of man are “Equal to the Angels” and that our bodies could be reserved for the “most Glorious Ends.” With antinomian zeal, Traherne argues that “through many Obstacles full of gross and subterraneous Darkness, which seem to affright and stifle the Soul,” the individual who transgresses will find themselves “at last to a new Light and Glory.” He evokes Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell a century before his fellow visionary would engrave his plates.

In Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake, Leo Damrosch accurately describes Blake’s verse as presenting infinity “here and now in the real world we inhabit, not far away in unimaginable endlessness. Eternity, likewise, is present in each moment of lived experience,” but so too is this a description of Traherne. Evocations of not just Blake, but Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism, for when Traherne describes God as “a Sphere like Thee of Infinite Extent: an Ey without walls; All unlimited & Endless Sight,” do we not hear the 19th-century American philosopher’s wish to “become a transparent eye-ball?” When Emily Dickinson sings of “Wild nights – Wild nights!” do we not hear Traherne chanting with declarative exclamation mark of “O ravishing and only pleasure!”

And when Walt Whitman wrote in his 1855 Leaves of Grass that “I celebrate myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” we are reminded of Traherne’s conviction that “all we see is ours, and every One / Possessor of the While.” Traherne anticipates Whitman’s “conviction that all the world’s loveliness belongs to him,” as Marcus describes it, the two bards united in the faith that “although the world was made for him alone, it was made for every other single human being just as it was for him.” Traherne derived his ethic from Psalm 139, an orthodoxy holding that we must “praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” But from scripture Traherne finds a heterodoxy which plumbs the city that “seemed to stand in Eden, or to be Built in Heaven.” In this New Jerusalem, Traherne would list with a catalogue of Whitmanesque regularity that the “Streets were mine, the Temple was mine, the People were mine; their Clothes and Gold and Silver were mine, as much as their Sparkling Eyes, Fair Skins and ruddy faces.”

Such similarities could lead one to assume that Whitman had a copy of Traherne as he gripped notebook and looked out on the brackish waters of New York Harbor writing of those “Crowds of men and women attired in usual costumes, how curious you are to me!”, or that Emerson considered the poet in his Concord manse—save for the fact that it’s impossible. Such are the vagaries of the lost man, the hidden poet who sings of “room and liberty, breathing place and fresh-air among the Antipodes,” this gospel of “passing on still through those inferior Regions that are under… feet, but over the head.” Traherne wrote in the 17th century, but he seemingly had memory of all those who came after. all those women and men who echo him even though they could never have heard him, who came to “another Skie… and leaving it behind… [sunk] down into the depths of all Immensity.”

Writing poetry from a position of eternity, Traherne presents a fascinating anomaly of what Johnson describes as “poetic inspiration,” for until 1896, or 1967, or 1996, or 1997, Traherne couldn’t have inspired any of those poets who are so similar to him. Blake or Dickinson had never picked up a volume of his verse. Traherne’s very life is oddly yet appropriately allegorical, his liturgy concerned with this “preeminent figure… [of] the Unknowable,” as Johnson describes it. She writes that at the heart of devotional poetry is the “perceptual inaccessibility of the divine,” defined by the “fundamental principle of mystery and unknowability.” How perfect then is Traherne’s verse, lost in libraries or singed in trash fires, hidden from view until revealed like some ecstatic epiphany? In the book of Acts, St. Paul speaks to a group of Athenians about their shrine to the “Unknown God.” Traherne is our “Unknown Poet,” overturning our ideas of influence and inspiration, whose work with a mysterious, thrumming electricity courses through the lines of oblivious Whitman or the stanzas of unaware Dickinson, as powerful as magnetism and as invisible as gravity.

Prisoners of linear time that we are, hard to understand that the vagaries of influence don’t simply flow from past to future. When Traherne celebrates “every Mote in the Air, every Grain of Dust, every Sand, every Spire of Grass” that is “wholly illuminated,” do we not detect Whitman? When he sings of “O heavenly Joy!” do we not hear Dickinson? In Traherne’s “On Leaping Over the Moon,” one of his oddest and most beautiful lyrics, I like to imagine that when he writes “I saw new worlds beneath the water lie, / New people; ye, another sky” and where in “travel see, and saw by night / A much more strange and wondrous sight” that what he espied were Blake and Whitman, Dickinson and Allen Ginsburg, you and me. Traherne is a poet who wrote for an audience that had not yet been born—perhaps still has yet to be born.

From his poem “Shadows in the Water” he writes of how “Thus did I by the water’s bring / Another world beneath me think: / And while the lofty spacious skies / Reversed there, abused mine eyes, / I fancied other feet / Came mine to touch or meet; / And by some puddle I did play / Another world within it lay,” so that I imagine Traherne saw nothing less than that other world which is our own, looking onto the mirror of the water’s surface as if it were a portal to this parallel dimension, these “spacious regions” of “bright and open space,” where he sees people with “Eyes, hands and feet they had like mine; / Another sun did with them shine.” There is hopefully a future yet to come, where “chanced another world to meet… A phantom, ‘tis a world indeed, / Where skies beneath us shine, / And earth by art divine / Another face presents below, / Where people’s feet against ours go,” for in scribbling in secrecy what poet has addressed himself more perfectly to people yet to be imagined?

Proper understanding relies on imagination, not just the role played in his composition, but Traherne’s strange status as imagined literature (for whatever manuscripts await to be plucked from burning trash heaps?). Alberto Manguel, writing with Borgesian elegance, argues in The Library at Night that “Every library conjures up its own dark ghost; every ordering sets up, in its wake, a shadow library of absences.” What is most sublime and wondrous about Traherne are not just his literal words on a page, but how we can’t disentangle him from what could have been lost, what perhaps still remains lost, and that which is lost forever. Perhaps in book stalls or trash fires there is more undiscovered Traherne; more rhapsodic, even more visionary than which we’ve been blessed enough to read. Traherne makes the comparison that an “Empty Book is like an Infants Soul, in which any Thing may be Written. It is Capable of all Things” and so is the infinite multitude of not just Traherne’s writings which we shall never read, but the full magnitude of all writings that we shall never see.

Traherne’s magnum opus exists in the gaps, written in the lacunas, on a scroll kept inside the distance between that which is known and that which can never be found. Traherne describes this place as a “Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not man disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God.” Poetry of empty sepulchers and disembodied tombs, of empty rooms and cleared shelves; a liturgy of the Holy of Holies which contains no idol, but only a single, deafening, immaculate absence. At the Temple’s center there is that ever tended, ever burning, ever consuming fire which gives off that sublime heat and light, where Traherne could imagine with prescient clarity that “From God above / Being sent, the Heavens me enflame: / To praise his Name / The stars do move! / The burning sun doth shew His love.” Power of such words written in light, heat, and flame. Such books can burn sacred holes in our soul, a holy immolation in our hearts, giving off that intense light, which diffuse though it may be awaits those eyes that have yet to be born generations hence.